This is a question being taken up in D.C., where a sex-bias probe will determine whether area schools are forcing an equal male-female student body, despite higher application rates by women.The Civil Rights Commission is looking into it to see if women are getting shafted in acceptance rates, as the Washington Post reports. When the newspaper looked into admissions data at 12 D.C.-area schools, they found that seven admitted women at a lower rate than men.Female over-representation at the college level strikes me as a good-or at least not-bad-problem to have (god knows it hasn't always been this way). But if schools keep letting in more and more of them, won't they turn campuses into giant hen parties that are inhospitable and unappealing to other applicants?That's sort of how the counterargument goes. "At some ambiguous tipping point, an institution may begin to appeal to a narrower demographic if it begins to appear more like a single-sex environment," wrote one admissions dean recently.What do you think? Would it make a school more or less desirable to you if the student body were, say, 65 percent female or 65 percent male? Do you think colleges should be forced to accept men and women based only on their application packages and not based on 50-50 splits?
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